The gang war in south Phoenix

Residents and police are fighting back, but are they gaining any ground?

by Richard de Uriarte - Oct. 12, 2008 12:00 AMSpecial for The Republic

It was late 2006. Valley residents breathed a collective sigh of relief after suspects in the "Serial Shooter" and "Baseline Rapist" crimes, two of the most terrifying serial criminal dramas in memory, were in police custody.

The arrests would usher in a period of sharp decline in homicides, at least in most places around the Valley.

But by New Year's Day 2007, a new upsurge in violence would erupt in south Phoenix.

Gang wars were flaring up over control of the drug trade, occasionally over turf and sometimes over nothing more than a menacing look, a simple act of "disrespect."

A few neighborhoods were turned into bloody war zones over night. Weekend parties became battlegrounds. Casualties mounted.

• On May 22, five days after an initial "Stop the Violence" community meeting was held at Bethune Elementary School, 14-year-old Jimmy Torres was gunned down in the 1300 block of West Cocopah. It was a case of mistaken identity in a back-and-forth battle between feuding Hispanic and Black gangs both asserting their control the area's turf and drug trade.

• Three months before that killing, over a two-day period, these same two gangs hit each other in a series of brazen shootings, one a homicide where the victim, Calvin Ross, was loaded onto the bed of a pickup truck driving away from the scene, then fell off the truck onto the street.

A walk-by retaliatory shooting at a house in the 1400 block of South 14th Avenue followed that. The house was peppered by gunfire.

• One night in the summer of 2007, two south-side gang members were fired upon while visiting their aunt's home in a rival neighborhood. Everyone knew the story wouldn't end there. Twenty hours later, expecting retaliation, the rival gang set up a military-style ambush in the South Vistas neighborhood.

Young men with guns waited in two abandoned houses on South 13th Place. Lookouts with cellphones sounded the alert as a car with four rival gang members approached.

Shooters blasted away from the side and the back, wounding all four occupants.

It wasn't over.

• Last fall, a victim in the South 13th Place shooting was arrested in the killing of two young men: Regis Jones-Smith, once nominated for "Boy of the Year" at his neighborhood Boys & Girls Club, and cousin Kenny Richardson.

• In the early-morning hours of June 17, in two separate shootings within two miles and two hours of each other, three people were shot and one died in the 1600 block of West Chipman and the 900 block of West Pima.

A total of 200 rounds were fired between the two incidents. Eight weapons were confiscated, including an AK-47 rifle, 9mm and .22-caliber pistols, and several shotguns.

• A few miles south of 7-11, two other gangs, affiliated with rival Bloods and Crips, spawned a messy guerrilla war between two neighborhoods, Lindo Park and the South Vistas.

• On July 31, 2007, Andrea Mitchell was shot while in a car with her boyfriend in the same general neighborhood. Wrong place, wrong time for the young woman.

In trying to make the escape, Mitchell's body was dumped on East Southern Avenue, where a memorial still stands.

"Is this ever going to stop?" Gloria Cravens, a Maricopa County juvenile-intensive probation officer, poignantly asked in another case of street violence involving youths and gangs.

The reply came, cold and resigned: "Nope."

Fast-forward to 2008

At a community meeting in June, police Lt. Mike Kurtenbach of the Phoenix South Mountain Precinct spoke with an unmistakable tone of satisfaction.

"Last year at this time, these officers you see today couldn't be at a community celebration like this," Kurtenbach told residents of the Alta Vista Community Center who were mixing easily with police officers. "They were too busy responding to crime scenes."

South Phoenix enjoyed a well-earned, quiet summer this year, the product of a series of sweeping police crackdowns and an unprecedented city-sponsored community initiative in four targeted areas.

"I feel good about what's not happening in the neighborhood," Betty Smith commented about the drop in gun violence. "I see more police patrols late at night, and that's a good thing."

Smith had lost two family members to the violence, including Regis Jones-Smith. She is especially proud that Regis' younger brother decided to go to college, turning his back on street revenge.

Still, it was an uneasy feeling this summer. Everybody - residents, gang members and police - knew the current peace could change at anytime.

"Anytime" came early Wednesday, when 16-year-old Melissa Vigil was shot to death. She was a passenger in a truck that was fired upon by at least two men at 12:45 a.m. in the 5600 block of South Vista Grande.

Police canvassed the neighborhood, looking for motive, leads and suspects, while Kurtenbach set up another community meeting, this time at First New Life Missionary Baptist Church, to speak with residents.

"Violence, sadly, happens, but it's incumbent for the community to get involved and send a message that crime won't be tolerated," he said.

Street violence is not uncommon in south Phoenix.

It has been that way since she could remember, Kerry Meador, a 30-year resident, said at Thursday's meeting.

What is so striking, to the outsider at least, is how many of these kids know each other. They played together in Pop Warner football and at the local Boys & Girls club. Some went to elementary school together. Young men and women in the Vistas neighborhood have relatives in Lindo Park, and vice-versa.

Yet they shoot and kill each other.

For teenagers here, gang violence has produced a generation of funeralgoers, just like their older brothers and sisters in the mid-1990s.

"I don't want to be the next victim," said Jason, an Arizona State University student who lives in south Phoenix but did not want his real name to be used for fear of gangs.

At 21, he estimates he already has attended perhaps 10 funerals.

A few young people are bravely speaking out. Kyra Johnson, a South Mountain High School graduate and now a community-college student, wrote a column in her high-school magazine last spring, pleading for an end to the violence.

"They're dead! All victims who have been killed by gang violence," Johnson wrote. "Yet another shooting has occurred, because of teenagers and young adults 'claiming sets,' staking out a neighborhood for Bloods, Crips, Gangsters or some other gang."

City response

Even as 2008 opened with more retaliatory shootings, the Phoenix police had responded with multiagency crime-suppression initiatives and investigations.

Several operations focused on the 7-11 Fight Back neighborhood (named 7-11 for its rough street boundaries).

In all, 1,146 arrests were made, including 132 linked to gangs, and 119 weapons seized in the South Mountain Precinct.

Gangs clearly were put on the defensive. The question was: For how long?

The 7-11 Fight Back neighborhood, after all, was the scene of a similar crackdown 10 years ago. Several of the officers involved in recent operations had participated in "Buckeye Blues." And although that effort generated indictments and favorable headlines, police leaders acknowledge it had little lasting effect.

"We did not do a good job working with the community," said Cmdr. Dave Faulkner of the South Mountain Precinct. "(But) we have stayed in these four neighborhoods, and we will stay. We've already seen changes in 7-11."

This time, police, city officials, community and religious leaders are determined to make a more long-lasting difference in the neighborhood, which for decades has been among the poorest and most crime-infested census tracks in all Arizona.

"I see drug addicts dancing on the street right in front of the school. But for those Hispanic and Black kids, it's normal. They see it every day," said Alfredo Lopez, 45, a recovering addict who set out as a one-man midnight bike patrol checking for criminal activity.

Police were the most visible part of a comprehensive "neighborhood-renewal task force," trying to solidify public-safety gains, fortify the residents with crime-fighting, neighborhood improvement and community-building strategies.

But non-profit educational, social-service and recreational agencies also were enlisted into the task force. Recently, the much-heralded "Open Table" program, based at Paradise Valley United Methodist Church, has been reaching into and "adopting" south-side churches.

Meanwhile, the city's Department of Neighborhood Services identified code-enforcement violations and boarded up the abandoned, foreclosed-on housing units that often invite gang takeovers.

The initial community meeting at Bethune School has been followed by other meetings, resident-run marches, graffiti sweeps, weekend parties and fairs, neighborhood cleanups, door-to-door surveys and a one-day, buy-back program for guns.

"This area has the greatest opportunity for change," Lt. Kurtenbach has said. "This is a community willing to partner with the police."

It is there that residents, especially the pastors, are most appreciative of the change.

"The police have done a superior job in cleaning up this area," said the Rev. Oscar Tillman, whose New Home Baptist Church members can now attend night meetings and prayer services.

Tillman, who doubles as president of the county branch for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says police communications are so strong, he has Faulkner and Cmdr. Kurtenbach "on speed dial."

This year, violence levels have plunged, aided by a well-publicized crime-prevention campaign in June and the deployment of 22 south-side school-resource officers into curfew teams with specific assignments of breaking up volatile house parties.

An uphill fight

But as welcome as the improving crime statistics are, one summer does not win a war.

"As to the question about how you break up the multigenerational cycle of gang violence, I don't have an answer to that," said Lt. Charlie Consolian, who heads the gang-enforcement unit.

Consolian, like practically every member of the Phoenix Police Department's brass, insists that "we can't police our way out of this," and that, ultimately, strong families and community organizations have to provide direction, motivation and positive options for youths in troubled neighborhoods.

Incarceration and confinement in prisons and juvenile facilities offer temporary relief. But, sooner or later, inmates return to the 'hood. And when they do, it is back to familiar faces and the mean streets where they got into trouble in the first place.

The cycle continues

A few miles east, in the Vistas, a different dynamic plays out. The neighborhood, east of South Mountain High School, has a long history as home to multiple generations of Black families, plus a huge influx of Spanish-speaking newcomers and the sudden arrival of new planned developments for multi-ethnic young families organized around homeowner associations conscious of property values.

African-American residents can only wave "hola" to their new neighbors, many of whom are from Mexico.

"We don't have a Block Watch because of the language problem and the gang infiltration," an elderly Black woman complained. "You don't know who you're talking to. And they don't call the police when things go wrong."

Unless they, too, are dissuaded by a strong family, or involved in school, work, church or sports, too many of their young will drift into gang life.

Without engaged fathers as role models, the gang becomes the family. Individual roles evolve into that of foot soldiers, defending their turf, asserting neighborhood pride, participating in combat operations and retaliatory strikes.

"Gang life has become mainstream," according to gang unit Detective Tyler Kamp - glorified in rap music and bannered on MySpace. The Internet is a veritable billboard for many gang members. They have used it to send angry messages to their rivals.

One South Phoenix woman summed it up in a few powerful words: "It's hard to be a boy around here."

Boy or girl, nobody said it would be easy, certainly not those whose vigilant efforts continue for safer neighborhoods and streets in south Phoenix.

Richard de Uriarte, a former Republic editorial writer, is communications director for the county Board of Supervisors. Reach him at deuriarter@mail.maricopa.gov.

Crips gang signs serve as grim reminders of a murderous presence in the Lindo Park neighborhood of south Phoenix. The local residents are fed up with the continued violence, and some gains have been made to coutner the ruthless infestation of killers, gan

More on this topic

South Mountain Precinct

South Mountain, one of six police precincts and one of Phoenix's largest, accounted for nearly a third of the city's homicides and a disproportionate number of the violent crimes. Its most troubled neighborhoods are:

• 7-11 Fight Back Neighborhood, part of Central City South.

• Lindo Park.

• South Vistas.

• Hermoso Park.

Between the summers of 2006 and 2007, there were 62 homicides in the precinct, a 41 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.